Valve 资助将开源 RADV 驱动程序引入 Windows 的工作

Valve 资助将开源 RADV 驱动程序引入 Windows 的工作
Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver to Windows

原始链接: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Sponsors-RADV-Windows

Valve 正在资助 Collabora 将开源的 RADV Vulkan 驱动程序（Linux 游戏和 Steam Deck 的基石）移植到 Microsoft Windows。该项目旨在通过利用 AMD 官方的专有内核驱动，使基于 Mesa 的 RADV 驱动能够在 Windows 上运行。由于他们并未移植 Linux AMDGPU 内核驱动，开发人员目前正在对 Windows 驱动的数据结构进行逆向工程，以建立兼容性。目前面临的主要挑战是 AMD Windows 驱动缺乏稳定且有文档记录的接口；团队正在探索创建垫片库（shim library），以确保在未来的驱动更新中保持稳定性。尽管存在这些障碍，该团队已经通过在 Windows 上运行《反恐精英 2》（Counter-Strike 2）成功演示了该驱动的功能。该项目的实验性代码目前可通过开发分支获取。

Valve 正在资助开源 RADV Vulkan 驱动程序在 Windows 上的开发，此举在社区内引发了广泛讨论。支持者认为，这一举措对 Linux 而言是长期的利好。通过提升 Vulkan 在主导游戏平台 Windows 上的支持表现，开发者将更有可能采用该 API，从而简化通过 Valve 的 Proton 将游戏移植到 Linux 的过程。此外，开源的 Windows 驱动程序有助于共享代码库、简化调试并增加社区贡献，使 Windows 上的改进能自然地回馈到 Linux 生态系统中。然而，这一公告也引发了褒贬不一的反应。一些用户表示，资源应专注于 Linux 而非投入到 Windows 上，对此感到不满。另一些人则提出了关于驱动程序稳定性的实际担忧，并指出尽管 Linux 游戏已取得巨大进步，但硬件相关问题和支持不一致（尤其是针对 NVIDIA 显卡）仍可能导致体验不如 Windows。总体而言，这一举措被视为 Valve 为巩固 PC 游戏基础而采取的一种务实的跨平台策略，而不受限于底层操作系统。

Valve has been sponsoring Collabora engineers with early phase, exploratory work for trying to bring the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to Microsoft Windows.

Experimental work is underway for porting the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver to Windows as this open-source driver implementation used by Linux gamers and a large part to the success of the AMD-powered Steam Deck and now Steam Machine. Valve funds multiple developers working on the open-source RADV Vulkan driver and other portions of the Linux graphics stack. Now they are sponsoring Collabora developers in trying to make RADV viable on Microsoft Windows.

Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne put out a blog post highlighting their initial work on porting RADV to Windows. Besides working on Windows WDDM2 integration for Windows, a big challenge with porting RADV to Windows is on relying on the AMD Radeon Software Windows kernel driver.

It's out-of-scope of this current work for trying to port the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver to Windows, so they are working on bringing RADV to Windows while relying on AMD's official Windows kernel driver. That in turn has led to reverse engineering and other steps for figuring out the proprietary kernel driver's data structures and other elements so RADV can be adapted to use it.

Ultimately for this to really work out well, they either need a stable and documented interface to the AMD kernel graphics driver on Windows or to create a shim library that can sit between RADV and the kernel driver as a stable interface to work through the undocumented changes between AMD Radeon Software Windows driver releases.

As shown in the blog post, they have been successful in demoing Counter-Strike 2 with RADV on Windows:

RADV Windows

The experimental code can be found via this development branch.

Valve 资助将开源 RADV 驱动程序引入 Windows 的工作 Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver to Windows

Valve 资助将开源 RADV 驱动程序引入 Windows 的工作
Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver to Windows